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Science Confirms the Obvious

I love it when a scientific study confirms something that I have always suspected. In a recent study of pornography use on the internet, it was determined that those who are on the far right, in terms of both politics and religion, are the greatest consumers.

…there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by.

According to the study, Utah has the highest percentage of on-line pornography users of any state in the union, Montana the fewest.

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favored Barack Obama.

The more repressive and authoritarian a religion is, the more likely members will subscribe to on-line porn sites. Residents of the 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages had 11% more porn subscribers than states that don’t explicitly restrict gay marriage.

The author of the study correlated his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion (see table below). States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement “I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage,” bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference ( 3.56 per thousand) existed for the statement “AIDS might be God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior.” Can you say hypocrisy?

I have a suggestion for another correlational study using the on-line porn subscription data. Is there a postive relationship between on-line porn subscriptions and listeners of right wing radio (Rush, Hannidy, Savage, etc.) or Fox News? I am guessing the results would not surprise me.